Bonus Recipe: A Worthwhile Chocolate Cookie

Reading And Recipes

How many cooking blogs do you follow regularly? And more to the point, do you actually cook from any that you follow? Let me know which ones in the comment section below.  I love looking at them as a form of relaxation, and I’ll confess to having gone down more than one Substack rabbit hole. Truthfully though, I maintain a long-term interest in fewer than ten – but out of that paltry number, one is from a French cooking website and another two are in Italian. I’m making a desperate attempt to not just master everyday Italian, but also to be able to communicate to the butcher that I want small duck breasts and not large ones. I’m hoping my brain still has room to squeeze in an additional language.

I was once told by the owner of a company that created custom pot racks for La Cuisine clients, that he viewed his brain as a finite parking lot. There are only so many spaces for information. When new information drives in looking for a spot, something old has to pull out. I like that analogy. Unfortunately, my knowledge of French seems to be idling somewhere at the exit gate while Italian keeps honking to get in.

Anyway, one of the blogs that I love to read and cook  from is written by Alexandra Stafford, who, after graduating from Yale, went to cooking school, worked in catering and cooked at a restaurant we loved in Philadelphia called  Fork. Its menus still look wonderful. She has written for several food publications and has published two cookbooks – one of them is in my 106 boxes sitting in a Milan warehouse. She has been writing Alexandra’s Kitchen for at least twenty years. I love her quick videos with the background of her children occasionally banging doors or practicing on the piano. I like watching her no-nonsense approach to her videos – she has  a camera directly overhead while a recipe is being visually explained. I even appreciate that when she speeds up a repetitive task, the sound is still on and it sounds like mice on steroids. Her introductions to her recipes are always personal, something she tried at a restaurant, discovered in a new cookbook or a friend brought to a potluck. 

About This Cookie

I am very picky about cookies – this is only the fifth  one I have included in KD — the others are my version of Chocolate Chip Cookies, Joy’s Pumpkin Cookies, Lindsay Shere’s Sugar Cookie and Charlene Sinkin’s Holiday Shortbread. I don’t consider the Beach Brownie really a cookie.This particular one, I discovered in my piccolissima  Bolognese kitchen as I was searching for a cookie that  was feasible with my limited baking batterie and almost non-existent counter space. It is a cocoa based chocolate cookie, which my grandson grudgingly shares with selected friends at school. His father, however, has not seen fit to share any with his co-workers.The recipe, Alexandra Stafford says is from a 2020 cookbook by Melissa Weller titled A Good Bake. I already wish I had a copy in my 106 boxes. I may have to relent and download this weighty tome onto my e-reader.

Ali (in my mind, we are on a first name basis) suggests using a digital scale to weigh out your ingredients, and I concur.  I also think you should weigh out the individual cookies as she does, for the sake of uniformity. Ali measures out 50gram balls of dough, which gives you a whopper American-sized cookie. I do 20 grams, which gives you one that is about 2  1/2 to 3  inches in diameter. And do buy the best quality cocoa you can find. I personally am not a fan of Droste or Hershey’s cocoa powders. I used Cocoa Barry in the US and use another professional Dutch brand in Bologna. I also think, once again, that Dark Muscovado sugar gives the cookie  more zing, rather than dark brown sugar. Do not refrigerate the dough before portioning.  The only tricky part for me to get the right chewy texture was the timing.  Oven temperatures vary  (I have had a hard time with this oven and rarely if ever use the convection fan).  In this case I found about 11 to 12 minutes was the right baking time. You want the cookies to be crinkly and crisp on the exterior, but soft and chewy (not fudgy) in the interior. If you touch the tops and the indentation is super soft after 11 minutes, take them out. If you overbake them, they are still good crisp cookies, just not as good as the chewy version.  These keep well in a tin at room temperature -And since I reside in la terra del gelato,  I am going to try my luck and make ice cream sandwiches with them. This will be, of course, research to benefit KD readers. And my grandsons.